By Their Fruit They Will Be Known

Have you ever seen an apricot on an apple tree? Or a banana hanging from an orange tree? I can sit in my garage all day long, drink gasoline and make car noises, but that doesn’t make me a car. If it meows, it’s probably not an eagle. Most entrepreneurs are so focused on sales, profits, cash flow and time, that they don’t take the time to evaluate options and people objectively. The fact is, appearances are only appearances: smoke and mirrors. And the reason why we should be aware of who people really are, is that we must carefully choose who we spend our time with.

Bob Harrison teaches us that “Birds of the feather flock together, and that flock is going someplace.” Whom are you flocking with, and where is your flock headed? He says that if you want big fleas, you have to hang with the bog dogs. Are you hanging with big dogs – big thinkers, or with losers? Your circle of friends and associates will largely determine your future level of success. Therefore, you have to be very careful whom you mix with. You can’t judge a book by its cover; you have to read it in order to judge it accurately. The people you bump into in a McDonald’s are different from those you meet at the Hyatt. Where do you spend your time?

At a meeting of the DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum, I introduced two people and I was paid a commission of 25,000 shares in a company. Those people don’t spend a lot of time in MacDonald’s. Successful people don’t think in terms of shortage, scarcity and doubt; they believe in abundance and winning. They are optimistic. They take risks. They spend money. They don’t make weak excuses. We earn within 10% of the income of the people we spend the most time with. If someone tells you he is a top business consultant and you find out that he works part-time in a government job, guess what? He’s a loser. He’s a liar. He’s a liability. Dump him, bump him, and move on. We know that if we change our thoughts, we can change our world. Your thinking is determined largely by the people you socialize with.

Back to Bob Harrison. He says like attracts like. Georges hang around with Georges (a one-dollar bill) and Bens hang around with Bens ($100 bill) and buy Mercedes Benz’s! Whom are you spending time with and working with? Who belongs to your club? Abraham ($5) is a good guy, and Andrew ($20) is also a good guy, but if you’re serious about success, hang with Ben Franklin. Now George might impress you, but when you take him to the bank, he is only worth a dollar. Spending time with Ben Franklin time is worth a hundred times more than spending time with George Washington! Classify your friends and decide if you want to share their future or create you own.

Finally, a good way to find out that people really are is to find out what books they read. When you read a book by Churchill, you are reading his words in your mind. In reality, you are thinking his thoughts! If you think the thoughts of Winston Churchill, you will get the same kind of results that he got! Isn’t that exciting? When you know what books people read, you know a lot about them. You cannot change people, so don’t try; move on to winners. When you want apples, make sure you’re climbing a ladder that is leaning on an apple tree. Join the winners of the DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum: www.dollarmakers.com

Robin J. Elliott.

You Should Also Do It.

Watch the Apprentice and you’ll see Donald Trump doing it with a number of other partners. British Telecom and AT&T did it in 1998. Now Yahoo and EBay and also Dell and Google. Ford and Mazda did it. So did Toyota and General Motors, Sony and Ericsson, Texaco and Royal Dutch Shell… Verizon Wireless, with 51.3 million customers, is a joint venture of Verizon Communications and Vodafone Group, with 55 and 45 percent ownership respectively. I could go on all day, but the fact is we see Joint Ventures all the time with large business. It’s been going on for centuries. Why? Because it makes a lot of sense. It makes EVEN MORE sense when small businesses do it, especially when they do it with no money and no risk!

If it’s good enough for Wal-Mart, Sony and Pfizer, Disney and Nike, it will probably work for you, especially since you have nothing to lose. I recently talked with a friend of mine who is an expert in asset protection. He told me that most rich people have always used this system to protect themselves. It’s nothing new. It’s just that average people are not aware of it. The same goes for Joint Ventures. It’s really not rocket science. All it takes is a basic and objective understanding of value, money, supply and demand, and leverage. The biggest enemy of JV’s is ego. This is usually what prevents small business owners from taking advantage of this smart money making system.

The smartest people I know are brokers. They are free of overhead, risk, employees, inventory, limitations, barriers and cash flow problems. They link people up and triangulate deals and spend relatively little time doing it. The returns are unlimited and all 100% profit. You don’t have to sell your own products or services or even own a business in order to broker Joint Venture deals. You don’t have to know much about the businesses you deal with. Short learning curve, long passive income period, low or no risk or cost, high return – it doesn’t get better than that! High tech, low tech, slow tech or no tech, it doesn’t really matter which bsuiness you deal with or where it’s located – the principles woirk. And when a deal goes south, don’t worry – if you set it up correctly, there’s no loss!

Here are three ways that you can lose with Joint Ventures: First, deal with the wrong people. Second, you don’t understand the concept. And Third, you don’t take action. The DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum was created to provide JV partners and the training and support necessary for anyone, anywhere, to ride the JV Magic Carpet to Financial Success. This is my Personal Invitation to hop on board and fly away from the frustration, fear and failure that so many small business owners have to cope with every day. No more “feast or Famine”, no more creditors knocking and no more sleepless nights. Unless you’re partying with us in Hawaii at our DollarMakers Breakaway Event, that is.

For more information, visit http://www.dollarmakers.com/ – you’ll be glad you did!

Robin J. Elliott

When You Feel Like Killing a Customer

We’ve all had that feeling of dread and discomfort when a certain customer darkens one’s proverbial door, haven’t we? I remember the last consulting client that I fired. I swore I would never consult again, and my level of peace and motivation has climbed steeply ever since. In fact, when I got home, Rika said, “You look radiant! Did you fire another one of your clients?” He showed up in the restaurant in the customary sunglasses – big clue there! – And I recognized that feeling that urged me to seek out a nice Benelli M3 shotgun and put him out of his misery. It would save a whole lot of people a whole lot of hurt. He is one of those “Big fish in a very small pond” who believes his own publicist – not that he can even spell the word. I think you get my drift.

I was having lunch with a Member recently in Beverly’s on Main at Wasaga Beach in Ontario and she told me how she used to fire customers in her hair salons years ago. She said that the whole atmosphere in the salon would lighten and improve when a “difficult” client was let go. In the DollarMakers Joint Venture Forum, I have refused Membership, fired Members and refused to renew others when we find that we have hooked a rotten fish. As business owners, we simply cannot afford to accommodate rotten apples and we have a responsibility to our other Members, employees, customers and associates, not to allow Customer Contamination.

The good news is that, sooner or later, people will reveal who they really are. They start off with a good impression (unless you’re really tuned into your intuition or you’re married to my smart wife) and from then on it’s a slippery slope, because they cannot consistently act in a way that is not congruent with their real values. The problem is, they can hurt some of your staff and customers along the way. The same goes for employees – they can do a lot of damage before you wise up and fire them. How can we apply damage control early?

My Scuba diving instructor used to say, “Equalize early and often.” Let’s apply this to a system for keeping our businesses clean and free from the wrong people. First, do a lot of due diligence and checks. Do your homework. Ask the competition, employees, vendors, and customers of the person applying to get involved in your life. Second, make sure you have created a way to get rid of people legally, quickly and easy. (Not with the shotgun.) Third, constantly monitor behavior and look for red flags. The red flags that I look for are showing up late, canceling appointments, not keeping their words, addictions like nicotine, alcohol, pot, sex, food or ego and personal presentation. (They can be immaculately groomed but if they stink of tobacco, they might as well leave right now.) Be aware.

How does an organ grinder discipline his monkey? True story: if he beats the monkey, the monkey will lose all creativity, fun, and initiative and withdraw. So on a regular basis, he kills a chicken in front of the monkey. Just to remind the monkey to behave. When you keep your operation clean and consistently remove the sociopaths and losers from your life, you will find the quality of people that you attract improving all the time. Be very loyal to the sheep and merciless with the wolves. It works for me. By the way, the Benelli M3 can be used in both Pump-Action and Semi-Automatic modes.

Robin J. Elliott www.dollarmakers.com